The Brutes

Synopsis

Zwei Männer, ein Mädchen, eine verhängnisvolle lange Nacht

On the edge of a big city on a go-kart track, Mike and Werner meet Alice and her friends. They like the girl. Mike manages to separate Alice from her group and get into the car with Werner. It had been decided to go to a lake with the others to take a bath at night. Too late Alice realizes that Mike and Werner did not drive to the agreed lake, but to a lonely gravel pit. The friends will not come anymore. And she realizes the intentions of her companions.

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A pair of career rapists pick up a young girl, separating her from her friends and cart her off to a gravel pit where she is assaulted by one of them, but then when the other comes to take his turn the dynamic between the two of them alters.

What are we to make of this then? It's clear right from the very start of the film that these two are up to no good, although we are told that they both work for the same firm, they seem to have nothing else to do with their time but sexually assaulting various women.

If Roger Corman had produced a rape/revenge three-hander psychodrama inspired by KNIFE IN THE WATER, then had to fire each director he hired (in this case, Antonioni, Peckinpah and Wenders) but kept all the footage, he still wouldn't have ended up with as a disturbing, thoughtful, brutal and effective film as Roger Fritz' MÄDCHEN: MIT GEWALT. This is a perfect highbrow exploitation film.

Fun fact: on the strength of this movie, Peckinpah enlisted writer/director Roger Fritz and leads Klaus Löwitsch and Arthur Brauss to star in his WWII flick CROSS OF IRON about seven years later.

This movie troubles me. On one hand, I think it has some interesting things to say about rape and rape culture, about how it is rooted in a certain concept of masculinity and about how hard it is for a rape victim to denounce their rape. The characters are layered and interesting. On the other hard, it often feels exploitative, as if it's attempting to titillate the viewer, and the sexualized way in which it presents Alice really creeps me out. The character development feels somewhat forced. Alice's transformation felt more like "See? She wasn't really that naïve" than "traumatized rape victim with Stockholm syndrome and hidden depths". The fights were incredibly bad for some reason, they looked like bad slapstick.

If Roger Corman had produced a rape/revenge three-hander psychodrama inspired by KNIFE IN THE WATER, then had to fire each director he hired (in this case, Antonioni, Peckinpah and Wenders) but kept all the footage, he still wouldn't have ended up with as a disturbing, thoughtful, brutal and effective film as Roger Fritz' MÄDCHEN: MIT GEWALT. This is a perfect highbrow exploitation film.

Fun fact: on the strength of this movie, Peckinpah enlisted writer/director Roger Fritz and leads Klaus Löwitsch and Arthur Brauss to star in his WWII flick CROSS OF IRON about seven years later.

A pair of career rapists pick up a young girl, separating her from her friends and cart her off to a gravel pit where she is assaulted by one of them, but then when the other comes to take his turn the dynamic between the two of them alters.

What are we to make of this then? It's clear right from the very start of the film that these two are up to no good, although we are told that they both work for the same firm, they seem to have nothing else to do with their time but sexually assaulting various women.